A detailed look at the European parliamentary election results (part 3)

Nearly a week after the European elections, the reverberations are still shaking the entire continent, on at least two levels — the consequences of the historic level of eurosceptic parties elected across Europe and in terms of the growing battle between the European Parliament and the European Council over electing the next European Commission president.

In the first part of a Suffragio series examining the results of the May 25 European parliamentary elections, I focused on the five most populous countries in the European Union: the United Kingdom and France, where eurosceptic parties won the greatest share of the vote; Germany, where chancellor Angela Merkel won another strong victory; Italy, where prime minister Matteo Renzi won a near-landslide mandate just three months into his premiership; and Spain, where both traditional parties lost support to a growing constellation of anti-austerity movements — so much so that Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, the leader of the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE, Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party), Spain’s traditional center-left party, resigned.

In the second part, I examined the results in nine more countries — Poland, Romania, The Netherlands, Belgium, Greece, the Czech Republic, Portugal, Hungary and Sweden.

In the third and final part, I examine the results in the remaining 14 countries of the European Union.

Austria was among the handful of countries where a eurosceptic party had a real shot at winning the greatest share of the vote. Austria’s two traditional parties, the center-right Österreichische Volkspartei (ÖVP, Austrian People’s Party) and the center-left Sozialdemokratische Partei Österreichs (SPÖ, Social Democratic Party of Austria), often govern together in ‘grand coalitions,’ as they’ve done since 2008 under chancellor Werner Faymann, whose SPÖ narrowly won the largest share of the vote in the most recent national elections last September.

In the European elections, the ÖVP actually narrowly outpolled the SPÖ by a margin of 26.98% to 24.09%. In third place was the far-right, anti-immigrant, eurosceptic Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ, the Freedom Party of Austria) with just 19.72% of the vote. Like in The Netherlands and Finland, but unlike in France, Denmark and the United Kingdom, Austrian voters veered back toward the political mainstream.

Another player worth watching is the newly constituted liberal party, Das Neue Österreich (NEOS, The New Austria), which won nearly 5% in last September’s national elections, won 8.14% in the European elections, a remarkable rise for such a young party.

After an election season last year that found Bulgarians less than enthusiastic about both major parties, voters passed an essentially deadlocked decision in May 2013. They had become disillusioned with both the center-right Citizens for European Development of Bulgaria (GERB, Граждани за европейско развитие на България), which won a landslide victory in 2009 under Boyko Borissov, and the center-left Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP, Българска социалистическа партия), which now leads Bulgaria’s national coalition government under the relatively technocratic prime minister Plamen Oresharski, a former finance minister, in coalition with the Movement for Rights and Freedoms (DPS, Движение за права и свободи), a liberal party that represents ethnic Turks and other Muslims.

In the European elections, however, GERB won a commanding victory, with 30.4% of the vote to just 18.9% for the Bulgarian Socialists. The Socialists, led by former prime minister Sergei Stanishev, did so poorly that they nearly fell behind the DPS, which won 17.3%.

That’s led to all sorts of speculation that the Socialist-led government, which has faced accusations of facilitating corruption, could face a vote of no confidence, leading to snap elections again this autumn. It’s also led to speculation that Stanishev’s position as leader could be in danger, and also that the government will appoint Stanishev as Bulgaria’s commissioner to the European Commission as a way to ease him out of the leadership.

No country saw quite as strong a eurosceptic earthquake as Denmark, where the nationalist, far-right Dansk Folkeparti (Danish People’s Party) won 26.6% of the vote, and won four of Denmark’s 13 MEPs.

But it’s not all bad news for the current center-left coalition government, given that prime minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt’s Socialdemokraterne (Social Democrats) won a better-than-expected 19.1%, outpacing the troubled center-right Venstre (Liberals, though literally — and confusingly, the ‘Left’), whose leader, former prime minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen, is under an ethics cloud for extravagant expense spending, including over €20,000 for clothes. Despite the disastrous results, Rasmussen has narrowly avoided being forced out as leader.

The European elections indicate that Thorning-Schmidt has a stronger chance at winning reelection in national voting that will take place sometime in the next 18 months. That has important implications for the European Union, as British prime minister David Cameron has allegedly indicated he would support her as Commission president. She could also be a candidate to become the Danish commissioner or even an option to succeed European Council president Herman Van Rompuy later this year. But the incentive to leave for Brussels changes if Thorning-Schmidt believes she can win a new term in 2015.

Despite its surge in national elections three years ago, Finland’s most eurosceptic party, the Perussuomalaiset (PS, Finns Party), actually lost vote share in the European elections, winning just around 12.9%, only narrowly outpacing Finland’s main center-left party, the Suomen Sosialidemokraattinen Puolue (DDP, the Social Democratic Party), which won 12.3%.

Leading the pack was the dominant force in Finland’s government, the Kansallinen Kokoomus (National Coalition), whose leader, Jyrki Katainen, has served as Finland’s prime minister since June 2011, after pulling his party from its social conservative roots and to the more moderate center-right. He leads a six-party government, including the Social Democrats.

Katainen, however, has announced that he will step down in June 2014 both as prime minister and party leader to pursue Finland’s position as commissioner in the European Commission. In recent days, however, Katainen has emerged as a potential dark-horse candidate to become the Commission President in the event that Jean-Claude Juncker, the European People’s Party candidate for Commission president, fails to win a qualified majority among the members of the European Council.

The largest opposition party, the Suomen Keskusta (Centre Party), finished in second with 19.7%.

Two months after Slovakia’s center-left prime minister Robert Fico lost a presidential race to independent businessman Andrej Kiska, he nonetheless led his governing Smer – sociálna demokracia (Direction — Social Democracy) to a relatively strong victory in the European elections, indicating that while Slovak voters may have been wary of elevating Fico to the Slovak presidency, they generally approve of his relatively strong economic record, which hasn’t involved the kind of budget-cutting that’s featured so prominently throughout the rest of the European Union.

Though Smer won four seats to the European Parliament, the EPP will actually win six seats from Slovakia, because each of Slovakia’s two Christian democrat parties each won two seats, and each of Slovakia’s Hungarian minority interest parties each won a single seat. All four parties belong to the EPP.

Perhaps the most intriguing element of the Slovak elections is the low turnout — just 13% of the electorate bothered to vote. That set a new EU record, besting the previous low of 16.9%, also set by Slovakia, in the 2009 elections. Ironically, despite the apparent voter apathy, Slovakia’s political spectrum features little of the euroscepticism that so dominated the elections in larger member-states.

After Ireland’s Labour Party lost all three of its MEPs in the European elections, Eamon Gilmore stepped down as its leader, taking full blame for his party’s defeat — Labour finished in far-behind fourth place, winning just 5.3% of the vote. Its center-left voter base has blamed it for the difficult, budget-cutting, tax-raising policies that have been required under the terms of the country’s bailout. Though Ireland officially ended in December 2013, though its effects will be felt for years to come, and Irish budgets will be equally strained for years to come.

Otherwise, the Irish elections were essentially a three-way tie, in terms of national first-preference vote. The center-right Fine Gael, which currently leads the Irish government, won 22.3%. The conservative Fianna Fáil, which led the Irish government through the mid-2000s, and suffered a landslide loss in the 2011 national elections after taking the blame for the failure of Ireland’s banks, the Irish housing boom and the Irish financial crisis, also won 22.3%.

Sinn Féin, the leftist Irish nationalist party, riding high on a wave of anti-austerity discontent, won 19.5% of the vote, despite the high-profile questioning of its leader, Gerry Adams, by Belfast police three weeks ago, in relation to a decades-old murder involving the Irish Republican Army. Due to the breakdown of Ireland’s various MEP constituencies, however, Fine Gael won four seats, Sinn Féin won three seats and Fianna Fáil won just one seat.

Gilmore, who hopes to stay on as tánaiste (deputy prime minister) and foreign minister, shouldn’t necessarily endanger the government through his resignation. But there’s still a chance that Labour’s new leader could pull the party leftward or otherwise bring a more acrimonious approach to its coalition partner, Fine Gael, which should worry Irish taoiseach (deputy prime minister) Enda Kenny.

Croatia, which became the European Union’s 28th member-state upon its accession in July 2013, participated in regular elections to the European Parliament for the first time, where it holds just 11 seats.

But the ruling Kukuriku coalition and its largest member, the center-left Socijaldemokratska partija Hrvatske (SPH, Social Democratic Party of Croatia), suffered losses to the center-right coalition headed by the Hrvatska demokratska zajednica (HDZ, Croatian Democratic Union).

The HDZ’s former leader, Ivo Sanader, who served as prime minister between 2003 and 2009, was convicted and sentenced to 10 years in prison on corruption charges (after he fled to Austria). His troubles caused the Croatian center-right to lose power in the 2011 elections, ushering into power the most leftist government since Croatian independence following the Yugoslav breakup in 1991.

The HDZ-led coalition’s performance is a sign that it may be shaking off the damage from the Sanader era.

But it’s also a reflection of the stumbles of the center-left government of prime minister Zoran Milanović since Croatia joined the European Union — including a high-profile fight with the EU leadership over the extradition of a suspected Croat war criminal and being forced to hold a referendum that banned same-sex marriage last December.

The most important election in Lithuania last Sunday was its presidential runoff, which soundly delivered a victory to the incumbent, Dalia Grybauskaitė, an independent and a former European commissioner, who won 57.9% of the vote.

Nevertheless, a highly fragmented electorate delivered an election result whereby 4.6% separated the top party from the fifth-placed party. The center-right Tėvynės sąjunga – Lietuvos krikščionys demokratai (TS-LKD, Homeland Union / Lithuanian Christian Democrats) won 17.4%, while the governing, center-left Lietuvos socialdemokratų partija (LSDP, Social Democratic Party of Lithuania) won 17.3%.

The liberal Liberalų Sąjūdis (LRLS, Liberal Movement) won 16.5%, and the eurosceptic, right-wing Tvarka ir teisingumas (TT, Order and Justice) won 14.2%.

The populist center-left Darbo Partija (DP, Labour Party), which and which joins the LDSP in government, narrowly won the largest share of the vote in the October 2012 national elections. But it finished fifth in the European elections, with just 12.8%. Labour traditionally draws support from the ethnic Russian minority.

Slovenians elected eight MEPs during the middle of a political crisis — and in advance of snap national elections expected in July.

Earlier this month, Slovenian prime minister Alenka Bratušek resigned after Ljubljana mayor Zoran Janković, the founder of Pozitivna Slovenija (Positive Slovenia), a new center-left party that won the December 2011 parliamentary elections, engineered something of an internal putsch to reclaim the party’s leadership.

Bratušek took power only in 2013 after the prior center-right government fell, following corruption scandals that implicated many of the members of the Slovenian political elite, including the prime minister at the time, Janez Janša, as well as Janković. In her year in office, Bratušek has focused upon steering Slovenia away from having to accept an international bailout.

Though Bratušek is forming a new party to contest national elections later this summer, the European elections were something of a dress rehearsal. Janša’s center-right Slovenska demokratska stranka (Slovenian Democratic Party) won the largest share of the vote (24.2%), while two of its conservative coalition partners, running as a bloc, won the second-highest share of the vote (16.6%).

National polls show that the center-left Socialni demokrati (SD, Social Democrats), which currently participates in Bratušek’s coalition government, could challenge the SDS as the largest party in this summer’s elections, benefitting from the fighting between Bratušek and Janković. But the European elections show that it has some work ahead — it placed fifth with a disappointing 8%. The elections were even worse for Positive Slovenia, which won just 6.6% and no MEPs.

Until and unless Slovenia’s center-left parties unite, it is likely that the SDS and Slovenia’s conservatives will return to power.

As in Estonia, the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, and wariness within the Baltic states over future Russian aggression, became a major issue in the European elections.

After a freak accident, whereby a supermarket’s roof collapsed and killed 54 people, Latvian’s reformist center-right prime minister Valdis Dombrovskis resigned in January at a time when he had hoped to be basking in the glory of Latvia’s successful January 1 accession to the eurozone.

Instead, agricultural minister Laimdota Straujuma took office, and she will lead the center-right Vienotība (Unity) into national elections on October 4. Despite setbacks for Unity in local elections last year, the Russian crisis has boosted its standing as a strongly pro-European party. It won an impressive 46.2% and four seats in the European Parliament — one more than it had going into the election.

The election was disastrous for Saskaņas Centrs (Harmony Centre), Latvia’s center-left, Russophile opposition party, which won just 13% of the vote and one seat, despite polls predicting it would win Sunday’s voting.

It’s clear that Harmony Centre’s role as the party of ethnic Russians in Latvia means that most ethnic Latvians don’t trust it to take power, especially in the shadow of a new struggle between Russia and the West. Among the three major Russian-interest parties in the Baltic states, Harmony Centre has historically had the closest ties to Russian president Vladimir Putin and the Russian political elite. In light of recent geopolitical events, that’s not only caused voters to flock to the more pro-European Unity, it’s also caused the ethnic Russian vote to splinter.

When Harmony Centre took power of the Riga city council, some Latvians expected it to broaden its appeal into a more traditional center-left party. It’s one of the reasons why, since independence in 1991, Latvia’s never had a center-left government. Unless the party reinvents itself, Latvian voters are likely to reelect Straujuma and the Unity-led government again in October.

Last February, just two weeks after his election as Cyprus’s new president, Nicos Anastasiades nearly resigned in the wake of a EU-initiated attempt to provide a bailout to Cyprus that would have subjected every bank depositor in the country to a haircut of at least 6.75%.

Despite widespread national fury at the European Union, regulators eventually came up with a workable plan, despite difficult capital controls. The crisis and the resulting fallout has been a disaster for the Cypriot economy, with GDP contracting by around 5.4% in 2013 and by around 4% in the first quarter of 2014.

Nevertheless, Cypriot voters chiefly supported Anastasiades’s center-right Democratic Rally (DISY, Δημοκρατικός Συναγερμός or Dimokratikós Sinayermós), which won three of the country’s six MEPs. That’s in part because voters still appear to blame the previous government for delaying a bailout deal with the European Union, ultimately exacerbating the Cypriot banking crisis. Accordingly, the communist Progressive Party of Working People (AKEL, Ανορθωτικό Κόμμα Εργαζόμενου Λαού, or Anorthotikó Kómma Ergazómenou Laoú) finished around 10.8% behind DISY.

In March, Estonia’s prime minister Andrus Ansip resigned after nine years in office in what was supposed to be a job swap — the idea being that Estonia’s European commissioner Siim Kallas would become prime minister, thereby leading the Eesti Reformierakond (Estonian Reform Party) into new elections expected in March 2015, while Ansip would move to Brussels as Estonia’s commissioner.

But when the Estonia press focused on Kallas’s past decisions as the head of Estonia’s central bank in the 1990s, uncovering controversial loan guarantees, Kallas stepped aside as a potential prime minister, and the 34-year-old social affairs minister, Taavi Rõivas, instead became prime minister in late March.

Leading a campaign heavy on security concerns in the wake of the Ukraine-Russia dispute, Ansip led Reform to win 24.3% of the vote and doubled its MEPs to two — Ansip and Kallas.

The Eesti Keskerakond (Estonian Centre Party) finished just behind Reform, with 22.4% of the vote. Ostensibly a slightly center-left liberal party, it’s more notable role is as the party of Russian minority interest in Estonia. Its MEP, Yana Toom, will become the first native Russian-speaking MEP to serve on behalf of Estonia in the European Parliament. Its leader, Edgar Savisaar, was roundly criticized during the campaign for arguing that Crimea’s referendum on Russian annexation was ‘legal enough.’

Despite being pushed into opposition after winning the greatest number of votes in last October’s national elections, the center-right Chrëschtlech Sozial Vollekspartei (CSV, Christian Social People’s Party) demonstrated why it’s still the dominant party in Luxembourg, holding onto half of the country’s six MEPs in the European elections.

That former prime minister Jean-Claude Juncker, who served between 1995 and 2013, led the EPP ticket for Commission president may have helped him hold off the Demokratesch Partei (DP, Democratic Party), whose leader Xavier Bettel replaced Juncker as prime minister last October, and Bettel’s allies in government, the center-left Lëtzebuerger Sozialistesch Arbechterpartei (LSAP, Luxembourg Socialist Workers’ Party).

Though the two major Maltese parties split Malta’s six MEPs evenly, the center-left Partit Laburista (Labour Party, PL) won around 53% of the vote, slightly less than it won in the March 2013 election that vaunted Joseph Muscat to power as the first Labour prime minister in 15 years. The center-right Partit Nazzjonalista (PN, Nationalist Party) won around 40%, making the elections something of a disappointment for Simon Busuttil, the party’s new leader.

In his first 14 months in power, Muscat and his government tangled with the European Commission over a proposal that would have essentially allowed foreign nationals to buy Maltese — and, by extension, EU — citizenship.

Post navigation

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Comment

Name *

Email *

Website

Notify me of follow-up comments by email.

Notify me of new posts by email.

Support Suffragio

Donation Amount:(Currency: USD)

About Suffragio

Suffragio attempts to bring thoughtful analysis to the political, economic and other policy issues that are central to countries outside of the US -- to make world politics less foreign to the US audience. Suffragio focuses, in particular, on those countries and regions with upcoming or recent elections.